Summary

What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order its search results from the trillions of webpages on the Internet? Why does Verizon charge $15 for every GB of data we use? Is it really true that we are connected in six social steps or less?
These are just a few of the many intriguing questions we can ask about the social and technical networks that form integral parts of our daily lives. This course is about exploring the answers, using a language that anyone can understand. We will focus on fundamental principles like “sharing is hard”, “crowds are wise”, and “network of networks” that have guided the design and sustainability of today’s networks, and summarize the theories behind everything from the social connections we make on platforms like Facebook to the technology upon which these websites run.
Unlike other networking courses, the mathematics included here are no more complicated than adding and multiplying numbers. While mathematical details are necessary to fully specify the algorithms and systems we investigate, they are not required to understand the main ideas. We use illustrations, analogies, and anecdotes about networks as pedagogical tools in lieu of detailed equations.
All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.

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从本节课中

Pricing Data

Data makes up a significant part of our cell phone bills. How do cellular providers set these price points? In this lesson, we will see how so-called usage-based pricing schemes can send better signals than flat- rate, “buffet” schemes, leading to better sharing of the network.

教学方

Christopher Brinton

Mung Chiang

脚本

All right. So we've covered a lot in this lecture. And let's just, summarize the key points that we've seen now. we talked exclusively about data pricing. Where we, we saw how its originally flat-rate pricing, and, with some of the, problems with that, and what made us recently switch to usage-based pricing, to more properly landing sentence right we. The ISPs couldn't really deal with those excessive demands anymore. They came about with our Smartphones and the ease at which we can access data, right. And we even argue that the primary use of phones now maybe even switched to data over voice and that's a possibility. we talked about the pros and the cons of different methods, so we focused mostly on comparing usage base of flat rate and showing how usage base is more efficient in many instances, but we've looked at others as well. then we talked about economics and that was a huge part of our analysis in comparing usage based to flat rate pricing. we talked about utility and what utility means is really users' happiness for a given quantity of their consuming of a product. Alright, the utility is never going to decrease, because whenever you get more of something, it's always a positive thing, no matter how small, it may help. and the utility could be constant as you go from one point to another. it could, but it's just, it's never going to decrease, usually always going to increase. the demand. We talk about the demand, which has the opposite trend. That's looking at how the quantity they will consume will change as the price, which is set by the network, is going to change. Alright, so a higher price is going to induce a lower demand. the demand will never increase. It could, it could potentially the demand will never increase with a higher price. There's a potential that it could stay the same. Right? For instance, if you're putting gas in your car, for instance. Something that's really, really important. Even if someone charged you a little more, you might still buy the same amount. And then we also talked about a graphical interpretation of utility demand. And that it's really important when comparing flat rate usage based pricing. And understanding. Really, what this graph means here, alright, so when we set our given price, what demand that induces, so if the price is some amount per gigabyte, then that will tell us how many gigabytes we're going to assume, based upon whoever the demand curve is, and So it's really important to understand what these, what the implications are of these graphs and how to read them. Then some major themes that we saw here. first the idea of the negative externality. Right so negative externality here in this case. We saw it back in chapter one with interference. But here it's in terms of any congestion through networks. So every device, by being in the network, is going to come and pose some congestion because they're drawing data from the network. And we need to make the devices internalize the negative externalities and the way that we do that is through feedback signals, right. And here it's a negative feedback signal right, issued in the form of money, right. So the more money that you have to pay, the less you're going to want to take away from the network. more incongestion because you're just going to have to be paying more and more money. And overall, we just saw that networks are expensive, right, and you know, that you can get charged $10 every gigabyte of data that you use, right? So, taking data from a 3 or 4G plan isn't cheap but now we understand why they're expensive and that's the main idea here is. We know why they're expensive there because of the demands and because we have to keep this supply per dollar. we, we have to account for the fact that the supply per dollar can't keep up with the demand, forever. Especially with our exorbitant demand increases lately, in the recent years with the smartphones. And there's a whole ecosystem out there, right. The ISPs need to at least recover their costs, but they're also province seeking organizations. then there's just a whole bunch of people who get their hands on this ecosystem and they all need to have the share of it. And that causes the networks to be expensive, but it's for very valid reasons. Alright, so hope you've enjoyed this lecture, I'll see you in the next one.